A channel manager connects to your sales channels (Booking.com, Expedia, Airbnb, GDS, your own booking engine) through official API connections and keeps availability, rates and restrictions in sync in real time. When a room sells on one channel, the others update automatically, and new reservations flow back into the PMS.
It is a paid product, usually a monthly fee per property, sometimes a per-booking charge. It pays off when you sell on several channels with meaningful volume and change rates often. Very small properties sometimes rely on iCal calendar sync instead, which prevents double bookings but does not push rates or restrictions.
In practice: consider a channel manager when the time spent updating extranets by hand, or the cost of a single overbooking, outweighs its monthly fee.
Simple hotel property management software for independent hotels, chains and groups.
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